Posts Tagged ‘architecture’

The landmark Pazzi Chapel in Florence is in urgent need of restoration. In an attempt to raise funding needed to carry out this restoration project — repairing the crumbling grey sandstone used on the facade, columns and sculpted decorations — the Opera di Santa Croce has established a Kickstarter project with the goal of reaching at least $95,000 by December 19. Donations range from $10 to $1000 or more. A pledge of $10 or more gets donors a thank you in the historical archive while a pledge of $1000 provides donors with a private tour of the restoration, the unveiling of the restored chapel, a thank you tweet, a lithograph and medal.

Culturplay, a gaming software studio devoted to promoting cultural heritage through playful learning, has collaborated with the Acropolis Restoration Service (YSMA) to develop the Virtual Tour of the Acropolis and Athens 5th Century. The Virtual Tour of the Acropolis is composed of high-resolution gigapixel images and panoramas of the Athenian monuments. In addition to detailed photographs, you will find descriptive information and maps helping you orient yourself on the acropolis. Athens 5th Century is a “political and philosophical strategy game that builds upon an intuitive simulation of ancient Greece.” Learn more about the game here.

The travel company Historvius has just released a new iPad app that allows users to explore Roman ruins without leaving the comfort of home. Sure, it would be nice to explore Rome’s ruins from Rome but sometimes that’s just not possible. If you can’t get to Rome in person, Roman Ruins HD makes it possible for you to explore over 100 Roman sites through 1500 plus images and Google street view. Roman Ruins can be browsed by site name, country, period, a map or by curated galleries and collections.

A construction company in Belize, looking for crushed rock, took their backhoes and bulldozers to the Nohmul pyramid complex near the Mexico border in Belize. The Mayan Nohmul complex is approximately 2,300 years old and located in the middle of a privately owned sugar cane field. Because the pyramid mound is (was) about 100 feet high and situated in a naturally flat landscape, Jaime Awe of the Belize Institute of Archaeology concludes that the destruction was a result of “bloody laziness.” All that remains of the pyramid is a stump about 65 feet tall.

Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer died at the age of 104. Niemeyer, a follower of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, was best known for his designs of the government center in Brasilia which created a new modern identity for Brazil.
To read more about Niemeyer and his legacy, go to the architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff’s article in the New York Times and ArchDaily where you can also view a YouTube interview with Neimeyer.

A developer in Phoenix is planning to raze the house Frank Lloyd Wright designed in 1952 for his son David. The David Wright House, which could be demolished as soon as Thursday, has now gotten the attention of preservationists who are trying to have the house designated a landmark and find a wealthy donor to purchase the house from the developer. Arizona private property laws limit landmark status to three-years so if preservationists succeed in turning the structure into a landmark, the battle will begin again in three years. According to New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman, the developers may be using the threat of demolition as leverage to drive up the price of the building.
To read more about the house and the preservation battle, check out the New York Times, the National Trust for Historic Preservation blog, the PrairieMod blog, and Mother Nature Network where you can take a YouTube tour of the spiral house.
Go here to sign a petition to the City of Phoenix to Save the Davis Wright House.

Google has teamed up with UNESCO, CyArk and the World Monuments Fund to introduce an exciting new resource that allows users to virtually explore and navigate world heritage sites through panoramic street-level images. The World Wonders Project uses Google’s Street View, Panoramio and Youtube to make sites like Pompeii, ancient Kyoto and the Palace of Versailles accessible to a global audience. Users can browse by location or by themes.

The Netherlands Institute in Turkey (NIT) has launched a site making the photographic archive of Machiel Kiel, the former director of the NIT and a renowned Dutch scholar of Ottoman architectural monuments in the Balkan countries, available to the public. Created for the most part between the 1960s and 1990s, the Kiel Photographic Archive contains visual documentation of many monuments that have not survived or have been significantly altered during the second half of the twentieth century. The publication of Kiel’s archive by the NIT is hoped to significantly advance international research on this heritage.

As of May 2012, the NIT has almost 1300 images digitized and processed pertaining to Ottoman-Islamic architectural monuments in the Southeast-European countries (outside Turkey). The next phases will process images of monuments in Turkish Thrace and Christian monuments and mural painting from the Ottoman period.

The Department of History of Art and Architecture, Trinity College Dublin has developed an open-access resource for the study of medieval Irish architecture and sculpture called Gothic Past. Funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS), it highlights three major photograph research collections at Trinity College: the Stalley Collection, the Edwin Rae Collection and the Moulding Profiles Collection. The images making up Gothic Past have been a primary resource for investigations carried out as part of Reconstructions of the Gothic Past, a thematic research project carried out in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Trinity College from 2008 -2011. The project monograph will be published in 2012 by Wordwell Books.

The Occupy Movement that started at Wall Street has quickly spread around the globe, aided in part by the vivid, compelling and, at times, chilling images produced by participants or (citizen) journalists. The Occupy Movement is also actively producing and syndicating some pretty amazing protest posters for distribution among its various movements through a site called OCCUPRINT: Posters form the Occupy Movement. Occupy participants can submit and share their own creations. Occuprint has established a PrintLab to generate prints for use in the protest movement (not to generate money — all prints are free).

The Visual Resources Facility has also documented the art and architecture produced by UC Davis Occupy. In our image catalog, you can see the memorial produced by Robin Hill and her students at the campus rally (November 21) and the UC Davis encampment aka Quad Village.